I'm David Rosenthal, and this is a place to discuss the work I'm doing in Digital Preservation.

Saturday, February 28, 2015

Don't Panic

I was one of the crowd of people who reacted to Wednesday's news that Argonne National Labs would shut down the NEWTON Ask A Scientist service, on-line since 1991, this Sunday by alerting Jason Scott's ArchiveTeam. Jason did what I should have done before flashing the bat-signal. He fed the URL into the Internet Archive's Save Page Now, to be told "relax, we're all over it". The site has been captured since 1996 and the most recent capture before the announcement was Feb 7th. Jason arranged for captures Thursday and today.

As you can see by theseexamples, the Wayback Machine has a pretty good copy of the final state of the service and, as the use of Memento spreads, it will even remain accessible via its original URL.